Dee Byrne's Entropi - Moment Frozen

The Guardian 80

(Whirlwind Recordings)

The second album by this London five-piece is a curious hybrid, one which marries John Coltrane’s late-60s interstellar voyages with Miles Davis’s intense electric explorations of the early 1970s. The Miles role is played by the clean trumpet lines of Andre Canniere, but the star of the show is saxophonist and composer Dee Byrne, whose muscular, intelligent modal improvisations take us into Trane’s astral jazz territory. Byrne’s liner notes talk of juggling order and chaos, and there appears to be a narrative structure here: early tracks such as Interloper feature spiky themes and dense, exploratory, arrhythmic freakouts; later tracks like Elst Pizarro and It’s Time build on solid grooves and forthright melodies. Some numbers are a little tricksy and overwritten, but even these are brought to life by the inventive comping of Rebecca Nash (lurching between Alice Coltrane piano flourishes and scribbly textures on Fender Rhodes) and by Byrne’s swaggering presence.